Derivative schlock

Rating: 1/10 (30 March 2014)

Pacific Rim is an exercise in unoriginality. By the end, I desperately hoped that the filmmakers had intended some cynical meta-theme about the poor state of Hollywood films today, but I gave up hope upon reading the pretentious boasts by Del Toro and his cronies who apparently took this boring popcorn flick dead seriously.
The plot is paper thin and not very interesting, mainly because the film is too scared to go anywhere remotely clever or deep with its characters, message or general story. Del Toro has said the message is meant to be the simple "we all should work together." Even though this statement is cheesy and borderline meaningless, it could theoretically work with enough wit & creativity. Instead, all the characters are annoying stereotypes, and the film's "message" is conveyed in the laziest way possible. Most of the so-called "character arcs" are basically "2 characters fight like whiny teens, eventually 1 of them does something helpful or useful, the other guy immediately pulls a 180 and decides they're friends."
I couldn't stand the 1-dimensional, boring characters. Even the central protagonist we spend the most time with never amounts to anything more than an annoyingly smug, whitebread hero whose "generic action hero" screaming voice will have you rolling your eyes throughout the 2nd half of the film. The female lead is so flat and bland that she constantly waffles between the extremes of an "impressive talented spunky chick" stereotype or an "unreliable weak woman" stereotype. Whatever the case, the filmmakers clearly thought audiences were too stupid to understand any characters who act like nuanced, 3-dimensional human beings. The lack of any worthwhile story, message or characters is a huge insult to the audience up-front.
Without a decent story or characters, what else is there? The special effects are widely praised, but every time the monsters or robots were on screen, I was acutely aware I was watching a special effect. The big CGI fights are trite and predictable with no distinct personality; they're the kind of thing Hollywood has done countless times before and will bore you to tears if you're older than 12. It feels as if the effects crew made a generic CGI effects showcase and the rest of the film was written around those hackneyed action scenes!
Even the soundtrack is typical & unoriginal. Most of the time you don't notice it there, but in the "dramatic" moments you might notice the incredibly cheesy and corny "scary" or "triumphant" cues, again completely bland and generic.
There are so many elements that serve NO purpose in this movie other than to be as derivative and unoriginal as possible. For instance, the pilots feel pain when their robot gets hit. Why? This adds nothing to the plot or message, but Evangelion did it so Pacific Rim needs to steal the idea. The computer voice is distractingly Glados from the Portal video games. Why? There's no clever reason or hidden meaning; it just adds to the vibe that this film is a patchwork of borrowed ideas for one meaningless mishmash. You could no doubt write a shot-by-shot analysis of all the influences and sources this flick rips off, and I'm sure that all the original sources this film steals from would be way more entertaining and worth your while than this bloated pastiche.
I won't even bother touching on the glaring plot holes and inconsistencies. The internet already has a LOT of material about the ludicrous flaws that pepper the film's already flimsy script. Personally I could forgive the countless illogical concepts surrounding the plot if it were a story worth telling, but Pacific Rim never even comes close.
If you want a film with any respect for its audience, skip Pacific Rim. This film seeks only to make easy cash by giving people the same things they've seen before, except without any cleverness or depth that might make them interesting.